The WATCH Dog subwoofer was originally designed as part of Wilson Audio’s foray into home theater products. Hence the acronym WATCH—which stands for Wilson Audio Comes home. Still, there is nothing in its design or function that precludes the Dog from inclusion in a two-channel music system, particularly where space is a determining factor.

There’s a widespread myth that since subwoofers operate in the low to subsonic frequency range, the sonic quality of the amplifier used to drive them is not critical. Couple that with the fact that FTC-mandated criteria for power amplifier specifications don’t apply to active subwoofers—a loophole which allows manufacturers to wildly inflate performance claims for what are, in many instances, the severely sub-standard amplifiers built into their subwoofers.

As a passive design, WATCH Dog allows the user to choose an amplifier best suited to match the robust power handling capability of the subwoofer, thereby achieving state-of-the-art subwoofer performance, whether in a single unit or a multiple unit configuration. Key to this flexibility is the external WATCH Controller.

A true subwoofer, capable of clean, distortion-free sub-frequency response, has to be sufficiently large to move the volume of air which visceral frequencies require. As hard as some manufacturers may try, there’s no getting around the laws of physics on this one. The key is proper internal volume. Since there are no electronics to house, the WATCH Dog remains small for its extreme performance, making placement in your listening environment easy with no sacrifice in performance.

When designing the WATCH Dog, special attention was paid to the driver itself. This proprietary twelve-inch woofer was specifically optimized for the two bottom octaves of the audible bandwidth. The driver features a dual spider design, triangulating its geometry (the third variable being the cone’s surround) such that the high-excursion cone can only move pistonically. An often-ignored area addressed in the Dog subwoofer dri er is reducing out-of-band distortions and colorations. The Dog simply does what it was designed to do: extend the main speaker’s range deep into the bottom two octaves without the deleterious colorations and transient distortion exhibited by almost all competing designs.